The career of Benjamin Harris – as publisher, the founder of a dynasty of printers, and early journalistic entrepreneur – was marked by imprisonment and exile, placing him at the heart of early New England periodical culture. He was the author of the first New England newspaper, Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, which was first published on 25 September 1690, only to be banned immediately thereafter. He achieved political notoriety through several anti-Catholic polemics before fleeing to New England to live in exile, which he preferred over imprisonment on account of his newspaper Domestick Intelligence in England.
His publications compel us to ask whether and to what extent religious convictions were driven by economic considerations: we ought to review early modern confessional strife more thoroughly from the perspective of economic gain and motivation, which included imprisonment in the case of profitable publishing enterprises. Despite the recent rise in periodical studies, this dimension has generally been neglected. Research has underestimated the degree to which early for-profit publishing was involved in public entertainment and sensationalism even when dealing with religious matters.
One should also examine in greater detail the relation between his publishing scheme, business strategies, and traditions of polemic publishing, public censoring, and prison history. Complicating the matter is the fact that his son(s) of the same name took over his trade, thus making it difficult to attribute particular publications or actions to him.
Philipp Reisner teaches as a lecturer at the American Studies Department of Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. His approach to research is multidisciplinary. His dissertation on the theological role that the New English theologian Cotton Mather (1663–1728) played in the context of early modern society appeared in 2012. He is currently working on his habilitation project, which is a structural study of Genesis motifs in contemporary Anglo-American poetry.
Prison/Exile: Controlled Spaces in Early Modern Europe 